First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  The stars, Kif—can you believe them?

  I never could. She carried summer within her, and now summer’s gone.

  2

  Another way of telling it would be to say that I had become a liar, that I neglected and abandoned Suzy. And that would also be true. But maybe we just couldn’t hold.

  I could begin this version by saying that for a time I raged, but that other realities were overtaking me, foremost among them the need to make money. I had gone back to labouring, but through a chance phone call from a television script writer who knew Pia Carnevale I got a break. He was researching the background for a possible television series set in Tasmania. We met for a drink, he liked my ideas, he suggested I write a treatment for him over the weekend for his drama series. I had no idea what a treatment was. Instead, I wrote a short story which, while never used, made a small impression.

  This led to that. Here and there—through his recommendation—I came to be offered hack TV work. I took it. It paid better than labouring. I even enjoyed it. I still entertained the lingering notion I was a novelist, and that once cashed up I would return to novel writing. But I had less and less conviction. Perhaps a novelist without conviction is a TV writer. Claiming to be the conscience of their nation, writers are more often just courtesans of cash, and I—I guess—was just one more. Besides, I sometimes asked myself, what was a book next to a dead man? That seemed to me an achievement of sorts, and I had no other. When I hadn’t known life, I had attempted to write books perhaps in order to know it. But now I knew. Or I knew enough not to bother.

  In any case, there were natural limits to any Tasmanian wishing to be taken seriously as a writer, as a head writer made clear to me on the first day in her writing room.

  A Tasmanian writer, she snorted, oxymoron or just plain moron?

  And I understood that there would need to be serious disguises effected if I was to make it through unnoticed and unremarked upon as a fraud and a phony. Television, as it turned out, was the perfect camouflage.

  I worked my way up, from writing gags for late-night shows to fill-in work on soap operas that were for a time Australia’s greatest pride. Once more, one thing led to another, and soon I was head writer in Sydney working on a long-running soap, and from there moved onwards and upwards to scripting mini-series.

  I awoke one morning in my newly purchased, overpriced Bondi apartment—exclusive, ridiculous—to the realisation that my great talent in life was a certain mediocrity that meshed perfectly with Australian television of the time. I had found my métier. TV was a tyranny and the tyrant was money, and I was happy to live in its velvet prison. It was work that offered everything a young man or woman might want—plenty of money, enough sex, a certain celebrity, the oblivion of industry.

  In those days television was about advertising, which aspired to art, while television aspired to advertising. I discovered in Australian television of the 1990s a lack of conviction even greater than my own. We talked—how we talked!—of wanting to write great, ground-breaking television. Our real skill though was meekly adapting our ideas to the programming conventions demanded by advertisers through their agents, the executive producers and commissioning editors, all of whom had droit du seigneur over any script. We made rubbish, and, in the Australian way, the more mediocre our work, the more awards and the more praise with which we garlanded ourselves. There was no end to our conspicuous self-celebration.

  Still, if the work was in equal measure gruelling and ridiculous, I was also learning. Within two years I had moved into production, where I’ve more or less—well, mostly more—stayed ever since. You probably have seen and forgotten several of my shows. That’s okay. I’ve forgotten them too. Unlike my memorable novel which didn’t fit into any recognisable school of Australian literature, I worked hard to ensure my shows were always recognisably Australian and immediately forgettable.

  That’s not the dispiriting revelation it reads as. Rather, it was liberation from ideas of immortality and genius that I associated with books. TV was the art of turning money into light and light into money. It was a more magic circle of money than Heidl ever dreamt. With TV, I was able to bring to bear so much that Heidl had taught me. I am not saying though that what I did was a con. I am asking the question: what is not? Where is the border at which your job, your business, crosses over into the badlands? Where is it? Because I’d like to know. I really would. Heidl knew, or he knew that much. I’ve had the vanity of thinking similarly. But not too often. Because I’d be wrong.

  At the time I wanted to succeed, and I had thought that life was about success. Later I came to a different point of view. Living is about being wrong, as Ray once said. But hopefully getting away with it. To live is to be defeated by ever greater things, and it may be that you learn from your defeats, but mostly you are defeated by what you learn. Perhaps the sole purpose of life, I came to think, is learning to understand the measure of your own particular failure.

  3

  The kids stayed with Suzy in Hobart. They understand—as I do—that I was freed of their gravity, that gravity which is perhaps another name for love, many years ago. What remains is something: fondness, certain memories—mostly invented—friendship, I suppose. Or hope. The deep dark things though, those things that pulse thick and hard through the wrists and heart and wake you drumming terrifying death marches in your ears in the night, that won’t stop screaming like torn flesh and crumpling metal—they cannot be carried together. They are not us. This understanding transcends bitterness on my children’s part and sadness on mine. We cannot be father and children. I don’t say that there are not worse possibilities—a Christian student in north Kenya, say; a Sumatran orangutan in a logging zone, or a Muslim refugee anywhere—but sometimes I see a young man playing with his kids and that joy—that joy—fills me with a sense of loss so large I feel I might fall into its infinite void forever and never stop falling.

  As for Suzy—though I’m told that there were one or two flings—she never ended up with anyone, in contrast to me, who couldn’t stop falling in with partner after partner. As Tebbe says, only the invalid stays put. I had a need in me, childish, initially appealing, finally appalling, for comfort, company, a passenger to share the daily journey through the night and all its attendant terrors.

  To be held, I guess. To be—

  But I am increasingly unsure.

  I admired Suzy’s strength, her courage, the neat contours and open generosity of her ordered life which seemed at once stronger and wiser than my own. That people pitied her and envied me after we split was comic. That they felt sad for her, thinking it had worked out for me and not her, was touching. In truth, my celebrated homes, my beach houses, my bathrooms, kitchens, serial partners, my décor, familiar to readers of architectural and celebrity magazines alike—all kept changing in order to fill the void I felt.

  But the void remained. The void only grew larger, blacker, more terrifying. I was like Ray’s turtle. Even with my limbs hacked away, with all hope gone, I couldn’t stop living.

  4

  The millennium came and went, the Twin Towers fell to a fiction made murderous reality, and I rose in reality TV production making fiction. TV Week hailed me “the genre’s sui generis genius.” I worked on the whole tragic series, from housemates to renovation to cooking and weight loss, while the world made of petty fictions great wars and wars’ terrible reality cursed ever more people. Over the years, I progressed from script development to project development, from project development to production, from production to executive producer, from executive producer to partner in a production company, to my own company, and, finally, when I sold out to the Americans, director of the Australian arm of ZeroBox Entertainment.

  I continued growing older, but the women in my life—some serious, some not, and these days none so serious—have steadied out at a median age of thirty-five. And that seems as right and as empty as everything else in my life.

  Tebbe again: there is about our pa
ssions something inexhaustible; we love one unto death only to discover in life the capacity to love so many more. We fear that this makes us fickle and shallow; we do not grasp it may be what is infinite and best within us.

  Or that’s what I try to think when I find myself having to think about such things. The good thing about making television is that it is rarely conducive to self-reflection.

  The latest left when I forgot her thirty-eighth birthday.

  Who are you? she screamed in our final fight. Who?

  I had no idea. It was two in the morning, I was typing, seeking to answer that very question by writing this memoir, and so I said nothing.

  Who? she said, reaching to shut the laptop lid before I stopped her.

  Who indeed?

  I want so badly to trust you, Kif, she said. I don’t think I can trust anything you say. I love you, she said. My sweet man. Why won’t you tell me what happened?

  I already have, I said.

  I read what you wrote.

  That is…that’s what happened.

  But is it? she said. Your story keeps changing.

  No, it doesn’t, I said.

  You wrote that Heidl asked you to shoot him. That you stood over him as he died, and he watched you. That’s what you wrote. But you always told me that you went up that hill to spy on him and he never knew you were there.

  What I wrote is what happened, I said.

  I watched her pull back a long curtain from a window that rose from the floor to the wood-lined ceiling far above.

  I don’t believe you, she said.

  Moonlight ran over the sea in front of her, and onto a car and some outdoor furniture beneath a statuesque eucalypt to her side; each was lit silver bright on one side and duplicated on the other in powerful black shadows, images larger, more real than the silvered objects themselves.

  I thought I knew you, she said. But I don’t know you at all.

  In front of me there was one word on the screen: Heidl.

  I deleted the word slowly, letter by letter.

  Heid

  Hei

  I want a child, she said.

  He

  Our child, Kif. What I wanted from the beginning.

  H

  Kif!

  |

  I sat back, looked blankly at a blinking cursor, and my hands returned to the keyboard.

  Who are you? she asked, and I could hear the rising panic in her voice.

  Heidl, I typed once more.

  Who? she was insisting. Who?

  —through this inadequate labyrinth of twenty-six symbols, I ask only one thing.

  Did you kill Heidl? I wouldn’t blame you.

  Remember me, Kif, your enemy, who ate your soul.

  But I wish I could trust you.

  But I wasn’t hearing anything. I’m a writer. I looked at the monitor as words, patterns, lives formed before me.

  Our baby, Kif, she said.

  I continued murdering memory, trying to learn to live again.

  Our first battle was birth, I wrote.

  20

  1

  I RODE OUT the good years, the golden decades, rode them hard, had fun, made money, and lost most everything else. It was pleasant enough and I can’t complain. I don’t judge myself, which is wise, for I would appear as rather lacking. Occasionally these days I am taken by the most terrible pain—when another woman drifts away, but less and less so; more and more so on the rare occasions I see one or both of the twins. They have a goodness about them. Forgive me—but the goodness—their goodness—it astonishes me, moves me. I tell myself that it comes from their mother, that kindness, that selflessness, and the thought comforts me.

  But after they’ve left I sometimes have a crushing tightness take hold of me. I am without strength, it is all I can do to sit and not panic, I can’t say what it is but I hear the blood pounding once more, as if it’s pushing to escape me and be free, as if my body or I have become some wicked prison, and I fear above all that their goodness comes also from me, that I once too had something good, and then lost it, or spurned it, or traded it, or somehow let it go and with it something fundamental. You can do that, you know. Lose some fundamental part of yourself. And you cannot have it back. Ever. There’s just a hole, like a cancer survivor minus their limb or liver or breast. But the hole has no name. Or it has, and you don’t dare even whisper it. Something good. And then it’s gone. Like the stars. Like a bird in a dog’s mouth. Like a child eaten by a wolf in a fairytale.

  2

  Whatever was human in Heidl by the time I met him had long ago atrophied as it has now also in me; in the mirror when I force a smile it is him smiling back. Sometimes, if only for a moment, I even worry my cheek is twitching. Destiny, like TV, favours repetition, all stories demand similarities, patterns, the music of symmetries and juxtapositions, and I realise now that in my life I have done little more than repeat Heidl’s own. In my own humble way, retailing lies as reality, I see I have become just another con man.

  In the production meetings and over the elaborate lunches, I would sometimes cease to listen and simply look around at the hucksters and boosters, the driven bankers and the resilient producers trying to pitch yet one more cracked idea, and I would remember Ziggy Heidl.

  His grotesque personality was a monstrosity, something almost deformed. Yet I am convinced that beyond all his endless talk was a larger silence about things of which he would never speak. I sensed a horror born out of a despair and a loneliness so terrifying, so absolute, so universal, that it amounted, for him, to an evil he could not escape, but had to accept with a clarity and humility that was breathtaking. When necessary he spoke at length about goodness, ethics, morality, but in a cold and withered way. There was an infinite weariness and surrender about his absurd words at such times, like grace before an orgy. Later, I met men and women who echoed him, but they lacked something—belief? desolation? desire? madness?

  Sometimes I wonder if Heidl was the only real thing I ever knew.

  I tried to free myself from Heidl decades ago, yet as I have grown older I find myself less in the tapes and now digital copies of my old television shows, and more in him—in what he told me, in what he taught me, and most particularly in his crimes which have now also become mine. Perhaps the two, his crimes and my programs, are the same thing. I moved on long ago from his memoir and made so many new things—entertainments so delightful I sold the idea of them around the world—bulimia races, real-life cancer competitions, and so on—but all these things are really his invention and I can see now he came to own me like no other.

  Take my latest succès de scandale, Dying to Know. Filmed in China where neither normal codes nor laws of any recognisable variety entirely prevail, it is my biggest rating hit. Ever. The idea is simple enough. Those who wish to die and those who wish to assist their loved one to die sign up to the Black Ace Club. Each episode begins in a gaming room, redolent in its decadent fixtures and crepuscular lighting of the pre-war Shanghai Bund’s dives. There six players play the game of release. Whoever receives the two black aces—of clubs and of spades—are condemned respectively to be the euthanised and the euthaniser. There’s more to it, but that’s the essence, and I must say even I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the viewer interest and the advertising it’s attracted. These words aside, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to autobiography.

  3

  Two years ago I found myself gossiping with Pia Carnevale. I was visiting the U.S. on work and it was the first and, as it would transpire, last time after that morning in the conference room I would ever again see her.

  The thing is, Pia said, I have this hairdresser. A lovely man, gay; Cherry, he’s called. I go to Cherry once a week not because I really need to, but just for the—well, it’s embarrassing.

  Go on, I said.

  Pia had taken me to a cold and for New York rather empty restaurant near the Hudson. Somewhere past the Village or next to the Village or behind the Village—I don’t know. M
aybe it was Brooklyn. I never really got NYC geography and the infinitely fluctuating social gradations in which it imprisoned itself. Pia leant across the table.

  To be touched, she said.

  She laughed, and leaning back on her chair she looked away and then furtively back at me.

  Ridiculous, really, isn’t it?

  Is it? I said.

  Pia had lost her younger, fuller figure and in her middle age was now very skinny after the New York professional woman model, a stick, hair now dyed black, her iridescent teeth prominent. Her bright, slightly kaleidoscopic wardrobe had ceded to dark clothes of better quality and taste but less character. But as she chatted her manner remained as I remembered it.

  When he shampoos your hair he holds your head so softly, he takes all the weight you carry. And it all goes away, and he knows. I don’t know how, but he does.

  I thought other, less generous things. I said, That’s special.

  The kindness of touch, I guess. For a few minutes each week I don’t have to carry that weight.

  Cherry’s popular?

  Well, I’m not the only one. There are a lot of lonely women in this town. Sometimes something happens in your life and you wake up one night in the dark and you know that this is it; that you’re alone, and now you’ll always be alone.